Roads: a concrete metaphor for the one and many 🛣️

This is kinda silly and obvious in some ways, but the other day I was really struck by a simple fact I’d never considered: All the roads are really one road…

My street dead ends into 34th on one end and 30th on the other. Like most people I think of this as a discrete path 4 blocks long and a couple car lengths wide. 

But aren’t we all thinking of it as something much greater than that too? The street is my access to the rest of the world—and it is concretely connected to every other street in North America  ;)

So is it really my street, or is it one giant system? It’s extremely useful to name a harbor, or bay, or gulf, but they’re all obviously one ocean. My finger is distinctly a finger, and part of the larger body.

I think this is a beautiful metaphor for a self. We usually think we’re thinking of ourselves like we do roads, with beginnings and endings. This is true! But we’re just as much the entire system, wholly interconnected with every other part. Getting from a small street in Austin to a small street in Winnipeg takes a long time, but in some incredibly grounded sense, there’s no separation between them.

With love, Jordan